Thursday, August 29, 2002

If you think I'm going to come home and cook a French meal after schlepping to Jersey, being labeled a soulless bureaucratic goon by an irate public, and schlepping back again via late-night public transit to my apartment in far Bay Ridge, all as an unpaid volunteer, just for your web-based entertainment, you're nuts.  What I'd like to do instead is ruminate on the essential questions posed so inevitably by this here loony undertaking. I spent the best years of my life as slavish devotee to the foodie movement.  I accepted Martha Stewart as my god, after some initial hesitation.  I threw away scads of money and time on gourmet magazines and cookbooks.  Thanks to some fortuitous cosmic coincidence, this period of my life roughly corresponded to my engagement and marriage, and so I escaped entirely breaking the bank on expensive gadgetry, but we certainly got enough of the stuff.  By the time we moved to New York, we possessed flatware and china and appliances galore, plus All-Clad pots bigger than some NYC studio apartments.  My recipe file bulged and gaped and eventually split, fatally stuffed with clippings from Cooks Illustrated, Saveur, the NYT "Dining In" section, print-outs from FoodTV and Epicurious.com.  And really, who am I kidding?  My recipe file still spills its guts all over our kitchen floor, and though I have cut off my MSL subscription, the unmistakable pastel glint of it on the newsstand still makes my heart race.  But I am strong.  And I have had enough.  Enough of the $40 olive oils and imported semolina flour and "please, Turkish oregano only."  If I read one more dining guru gushing about "honest ingredients, treated with respect," I shall vomit, sir.  And "Market Menus"?  Dont get me started.  The well-meant "food revolution" Alice Waters instigated some thirty years ago has metastasized horribly.  The Victorians served Strawberries Romanoff in December; now we demonstrate our superiority by serving our organic, dewy heirloom strawberries only during the two-week period when they can be picked ripe off the vine at the boutique farm down the road from our Hamptons bungalow.  People speak of gleaning the green markets for the freshest this, the thinnest that, the greenest or firmest or softest whatever, as if what they're doing is a selfless act of consummate care and good taste, rather than the privileged activity of someone who doesn't have to work for a living. The more things change, the more they stay the same. But Julia Child isn't about that. Julia Child wants you -- that's right, you, the one living in the tract house in sprawling suburbia with a dead-end secretarial job and nothing but a Stop-n-Shop for miles around -- to master the art of french cooking.  (No caps, please.)  She wants you to know how to make good pastry, and also how to make those canned green beans taste alright.  She wants you to remember that you are human, and as such are entitled to that most basic of human rights, the right to eat well and enjoy life. And that, my friends, blows heirloom tomatoes and first-press Umbrian olive oil out of the fucking water. P.S.  Noy Thrupkaew has some excellent, though a bit black-and-white for my recovering addicts tastes, thoughts on the Martha/Julia conundrum.  And Caitlin Flanagan, reviewing some recent tell-all Martha biographies, is even more thought-provoking.   12:01:04 AM    comment []